by Bryan Hurt
“You mean like move?”
“I mean that you may find other, more suitable, arrangements for your situation,” he said. His eyes were brown and shiny and full of comedy.
“I’ll let you know what we decide,” I said, trying to sound tough and savvy, as if he was in danger of losing me, as if he needed me, as if I wasn’t just a part of a long line of people who had lived lives in apartments, gotten screwed over by some landlord or another, and moved on, part of a long line of people and their ghosts, in a building that was built before movies had sound.
I LOOKED ALL this stuff up. I may be cashing this week’s check on Friday and broke by Monday, driving a forklift at FedEx, a waiter before that, McDonald’s and Burger King when I was kid and didn’t know any better, but now I know how things work. If a building is refurbished in LA after 1990, even if the building is old as hell, like my building, it doesn’t count for rent control. So Fatty or Hardy or whatever his name was had some legs to stand on with his smarmy ultimatums. If I didn’t like it, I was “free” to leave because now there were plenty of what looked mostly like twenty-five-year-old kids with mysterious jobs that paid them in buckets of cash so that they could afford $3,000 rent. Everybody was a stylist or blogger or some crap. Downtown. Me, I was forty. And yes, I’d had it good for most of my years in the building and, after all, I was one of those kids ten years ago, moving in and pushing out people who lived downtown before anything was refurbished, when they paid $300 dollars a month for rooms and walked down the hallway to take a dump and brush their teeth. I had no business complaining about being chased out. Still. I’m asking. Where are people supposed to go? Where do they go? Does it really come down, always, to the cold, cold, hard, hard cash? I know. Where have I been? But I’m telling you. Down in the lobby they had this old-timey directory with folks’ names that used to live and work in the building. Crazy names with eight vowels in a row followed by ten consonants. Long-ass names. That directory? That’s some scary stuff right there. Who wants to get off the elevator and look at the names of ghosts every day? My point is this: people’s time in places has got to count for something. You don’t just yank the lye-tasting coffee out of a guy’s hand after ten years. I blamed Fatty Hardy for his Essex Properties corporate humanity-killing policies. All this was his fault with that ventriloquist dummy smile of his. That was what I thought at the time, but now I know I just needed somebody to pay for the injustice of some people being rich as hell and other people being forty years old with rotating roommates. I started watching the guy more closely, revenge in my heart. Nothing crazy like a mysterious pratfall down a flight of stairs or busting his noggin on a slapstick banana peel in one of our ancient, tiled hallways. Just a little humiliation to take him down a peg. Let him have the feeling of staring at a wall with suspenders and dimples.
I tried to get Franklin on the case, too, but the disassembled IKEA furniture writing was on the wall. He wasn’t going to be my roommate for much longer. He was already making noise about how the extra 10 percent was going to be steep, and he didn’t know, so on and so forth. “I dunno know, man. Kinda steep. I can check out Culver City for that price. It’s supposed to be pretty chill over there.”
When I watched Fatty Hardy, as it turned out, I learned a thing or two, for real. Dude was ruthless. Turns out, we got off light in his office. That was him being warm and hospitable. He was tearing the work crew new ones on the regular, but only when he thought he wasn’t being watched. When he didn’t think eyes were on him, he played the warden. “Javier. Get this mop and broom out of the way. We’re always showing, you know that.” Or “Hector. Don’t you ever leave the security desk for longer than five minutes. We need someone present at all times.” One time he caught me looking at him. He was yelling at Janet. Nice. Always talked about how hot it was in the lobby, didn’t I think? She always wiped down the fake red velvet in the elevators. People wrote fuck you with their fingers and drew uninspired dicks that were majestically lit by the halogen lights in the ceiling of the elevator. One day she forgot to use the lemony-smelling stuff to cover up the funky smell of dogs too big to be living in apartments in the first place.
“If I get in another elevator,” he said, pointing a finger in her face, “and it don’t smell like lemon? We’re going to have a problem.”
“Yes, sir,” Janet said, nodding, and some braids fell out of her scarf and onto her face. Hot. She was hot. Not a part of the story. I’m just saying. Right when I stopped looking at Janet, though, was when I saw Fatty Hardy see me. Up popped the puppet smile. But before that, there was a moment. Maybe he saw what he looked like through my eyes: a guy way too big to be looming over and pointing a finger at a woman who happened to be not his color. Yeah. It looked bad. My eyes agreed with his eyes. But then the moment was gone and we were back to the dimples. He gave me a nod and strolled back to his office. Another time, in the lobby, I watched him bend over to pick up a piece of something on the floor, and when he bent over, his ass looking like a pinstriped mattress, I was hoping so bad that his pants would split straight down the middle with the loud sound of ripping sheets, laugh track in my head. But no luck. When he stood up and turned around, what he saw was a dude staring at his ass. His eyes got small, trying to figure out my motives, but this time he didn’t even bother with the nice act. He nodded, his lips pinched together, and gave me a look that said, Why should I be nice to you, you goddamn pervert?
STILL, I GOT what I thought I wanted. I saw Fatty Hardy go down.
There’s this big conference room in the lobby, with glass walls so you can see in. Whoever’s in there working or whatever. It’s supposed to be for anybody in the building, but I never see anyone but the old guys who own the building in there. About four months after Franklin and I dropped our pants, bent over, and got charged another 10 percent, Fatty Hardy was sitting in the room with three guys with white hair, striped oxford shirts. I was sitting in one of the truly stupid, overlarge silver chairs that were supposed to be all about deco elegance or something, pretending to go through my mail. Franklin buzzed himself into the lobby just then and sat on the arm of my chair.
“What are you doing? You never sit down here.” His eyes followed mine. “What’s that all about?” He tilted his chin toward the conference room. There was lots of hands waving, nods, staring into space, notes being taken. “I’m trying to see,” I said. I was talking out the side of my mouth, trying not to move my lips.
“Are you purposely talking like that? What are you, some spy now? Nobody cares,” he said. “They can’t even hear us.” He looked back at the room. “Jesus. Look at the sweat on Arbuckle. It’s really coming down.”
“Hardy,” I said.
And then, the conference room door opened and the old guys came out, all of them wearing pleated khakis and loafers. I don’t know what got into me, but right then, I would have taken Fatty Hardy’s suspenders and rounded collars over any one of those guys’ bread-colored pants and loud Easter-looking shirts. Timeless. One of them patted Fatty Hardy on the back. He shook his hand and said the worst words in the world that one human can say to another human. He said, “Good luck.”
BUILDINGS TALK. THAT’S the cool thing about them in case you don’t live in an apartment. It’s true: Maybe I don’t really know anybody in a building of what? Three hundred lofts or something? But how do I know all the stuff I know? That’s what I’m talking about. The building’s got a big mouth. That’s how I know that Fatty Hardy lost his job and that’s how I know he lost it by trying too hard to hold on to it. The dudes in the khakis weren’t fucking around. They wanted mo money, mo money, mo money. They made Fatty Hardy the enforcer, but that was his doom. So many people said, What do I need to pay another $200 a month for? I’m out. I saw it coming, myself. The big turnover. From my apartment window, I could see into the windows of so many empty apartments across the way, and those windows looked like eyes staring right back at me like, What are you looking at? You’re next.
Maybe a week later, Franklin and I went downstairs to the bar underneath the building. It’s the oldest bar in LA, built in 1908. They sell French dip sandwiches and cocktails that are tasty, but me, I’m not the mixology-type guy. I’m just a straight-whiskey-in-a-glass-no-ice-type guy. I just like places with liquor. But I tell you the thing I like best about the place downstairs: it’s the first place in LA that had a check-cashing service, way back in the day. I like the idea. You get your check cashed, get yourself a sandwich and a nice pop of something not fancy but strong, and you’re good to go.
When Franklin and I got downstairs we saw right away, bellied up to the bar, there was Fatty Hardy. There were exactly two seats left, of course, right next to him, and so Franklin pretended that he had to tie his shoes when we were walking up to the bar, I guess so I’d have to sit next to him. Jackass. That made me get to him first but then I took the seat next to the seat next to Fatty Hardy, because Franklin’s no chess player. He couldn’t see the move after his. “Jerk,” he said as he sat down.
“What?” Fatty Hardy halfway turned to Franklin and took a sip of something brown.
“Oh. No,” Franklin said. “Him. I was talking to him.” He pointed his thumb my way.
Fatty leaned over. When he saw it was me, he held his glass up in a toast. I didn’t know what that meant. It gave me the creeps. He and I? We were not cool. We were definitely not down. He was not my peeps. Thanks to him, around the same time the next year I’d have another roommate, this one with a 1980s Mohawk and those fucked-up plugs in his ears that stretched them to shit.
But a funny thing happens when you drink with somebody. You get to be somebody’s history, the memory of a stranger. That night we had some laughs sure, but also, I remember this: we were steady getting drunk but I was getting sad. Fatty Hardy kept saying, “You’re all right, the two of yous” and “That looks all right, that mustache” to Franklin. Fatty Hardy kept putting his sentences out of order and sounding weird like somebody’s grandfather from the old country. I started missing him already and that was good, I guess, because I never saw the guy again. And my new roommate, I can’t say to him and have him understand, no matter how big his drooping ears are, I can’t say, “’Member that one manager? Fatty Hardy? That belt he used to wear? Damn.”
That night was a good night. The backbar is old, dark and oaky-looking, soft lights and the names of guys from years and years ago who drank enough to have their names up there from 1908 to now. The music was good. First Bowie then Aretha, then Zeppelin. In the mirror of the backbar, I could see the framed black-and-white photos on the wall behind us, people who were history looking back at us in the mirror. One of them looked like Marilyn Monroe.
“Marilyn Monroe!” I turned around and pointed. There was a guy next to me with a huge Afro. “Naw, dude. That’s some other lady that just look like her.” He pointed at me. “James Dean!” “No, no, no,” his friend said. He pointed at me and covered his mouth with his fist. “Oh shit. You know who that motherfucker look like? What’s that dude on Happy Days?”
“Screw you guys,” I said. I was so faded. Franklin was working on some girl with a ring in her nose, I remember that, and by then Fatty Hardy was gone. Vanished. I said it again. I said, “Screw you guys!”
“Man,” the guy next to me said. He pulled on my T-shirt. “Sit your drunk ass down.”
“No,” I said. “No! My name is Marty Allen Jones and I been living here for ten years and I’m going to live here for ten more, maybe even forever, and I’m home and ain’t going nowhere!”
Lifehack at Bar Kaminuk
by Mark Chiusano
When Anderson arrived at the bar for the new-employee welcoming event, he knew already that it had been a mistake. He searched the room a little warily. There in the far corner, where tables were available for reservation, were the members of the small start-up he worked for, gesturing wildly at each other. Before Anderson could think better of it, Griff, the marketing coordinator and second-most-recent hire, spotted him and raised both hands in victory greeting. In doing so, he accidentally sloshed excess beer on the seat that had been kept vacated, Anderson supposed, for Anderson.
Anderson walked to the seat and claimed it. There was a general howl of greeting, and he was instantly regaled with some story that he had missed, while he had been in the office working—where had he been, by the way? Why hadn’t he come down earlier, like a true red-blooded American? Anderson, you work too hard! Anderson, in fact, had been more or less twiddling his thumbs up in the sleek offices that they shared with a few other start-ups, full of quiet glass doors and elegant secretaries, some of them male, but no books other than the ones that the start-up that Anderson worked for kept piled on their secretary (female)’s desk, color-coded in the general arc of a rainbow and spread out edge to spine. The company was called FicShare. The idea behind it was that people could use the content on their Kindles or iPads that their friends or family weren’t using—they could stream it, like Slingbox did for TV. At the moment you were limited to a maximum of five ShareBuddies, but the plan was for up to ten. The online interface was much slicker than the regular e-reading experience, and the ultimate goal was a community of readers, sharing and recommending texts. Marginalia would be transmitted, and book chats were easy to initiate. Anderson was the editorial side of the start-up. Sometimes, Anderson worried that if it really succeeded like everyone else in the company thought it would, it would destroy the reading economy. It’s just like a library, they reassured Anderson, and that and stock options made him feel slightly better.
It wasn’t as if he was flooded with better offers. FicShare was the highest-paying employer he’d ever had, combined with the fewest responsibilities. His job was to curate the selections, in addition to writing short blog posts about the books that users were using, and generally manning the content that kept FicShare’s website fresh and new. This was all quite simple and he usually knocked off most of it by around 11:45 in the morning (the programmers never got in until ten, so neither did he). He took a long lunch and walk around noon, often to the water, where he leaned against the railing’s edges and pondered throwing himself in—to swim, not Virginia Woolf. He’d stare, happily/melancholically, out toward New Jersey. By two he was back in the office, playing solitaire or skimming an old paperback or tapping out a blog post on Ian Fleming, while the headphoned programmers pounded wordlessly away.
Anderson turned his attention to Griff, the new marketing coordinator, who was trying to engage with him. Griff had graduated from some fancy school, Duke or Dartmouth, only three or four years ago. Anderson had known from the moment that he met him that he was different from the programmers, who most often opened up only when they were drunk or taking a break from work—Griff talked your ear off 24/7. Though Griff’s resume (Anderson had snooped: he had a thing for resumes) claimed that he was proficient in JavaScript and C++, Anderson tended to doubt it, no matter what it was worth—or guessed he was proficient only insofar as could be accomplished by a class or two as an elective at whichever bucolic campus he’d been spawned on. He had worked for an event-planning company before this, high-end, proselytizing for an app someone else had created.
Time, Griff said profoundly in Anderson’s general direction.
I’m sorry, asked Anderson.
Griff’s watery smile wavered a little. ’Bout time, he said. That you made it down here, he continued, when Anderson hadn’t added anything to their rather one-way conversation.
Busy day at the office, Anderson said. I hear that my brother, said Griff. Griff usually wore polo shirts tucked into extremely neat, probably expensive jeans, and today he had added a blazer.
I’m gonna grab a drink, Anderson said. Then he said, his voice a little lower, Any tabs open? Sometimes the founders, Nikil and James, would come early to slip a card onto the bar, and then leave. The bar owners were trustworthy enough that they could pick it up, more or less unabused, when they came back in the mornin
g. Anderson had met the pair of them at a bookstore reading where he was filling in as a moderator. It was the most work he’d done in weeks, other than transcribing conversations for a reality TV show. The reading was for a paltry book, a regular MFA collection of short stories, that he’d read the first three-quarters of the night before. We’re looking for someone of your caliber, Nikil and James told Anderson, while the author’s friends and family crowded up around the writer afterward, gushing and not buying books. Anderson didn’t think at the time that maybe they meant someone of medium-level caliber. Anderson’s then-current bio, chalked in next to the writer’s, hardly visible over the erasure of the true moderator’s more eye-catching credentials (New York Times, FSG), said simply, “Freelance editor.” They gave him their shared business card, which felt slim and small in his pocket. When he interviewed, he was surprised by their wide-ranging knowledge of American and international literature, and their seeming commitment to education and the literary sphere. They were in discussions with PEN International, they said. Truthfully Anderson wouldn’t have said no to any offer at that point. He had been on the verge of writing to his old dissertation adviser to see what she thought about getting the band back together once again.
Tab, Griff asked innocently. What is this bar tab you speak of? Perhaps you mean the credit plastic in your wallet at the moment, kind sir? This was Griff’s idea of humor. Anderson had made the mistake of telling him once that though he was most familiar with contemporary literature, his favorite book of all time was the Morte d’Arthur. Just let me know before I buy us both a drink, Anderson said. Now we’re talking, Griff said, grinning. Then he leaned close to Anderson. Nikil stopped by but he was pretty flustered, he said. He continued: Apparently she didn’t take the job.
This was mildly interesting to Anderson. It was, in point of fact, the reason for this happy hour—held in honor of the number-one newest hire, fresher even than Griff. Every time FicShare hired a new employee, they held a bit of a gathering at the Kaminuk or a similar SoHo bar, before the employee started work. After he or she signed a contract of course, but before their first day. The idea was, according to James and Nikil, that the post-first-day drink felt somewhat apologetic, or carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick: work hard, drink a little. Hold the welcome celebration before, and the employee was already a part of the family. It wasn’t a bad philosophy, as with most things that Nikil and James thought of. Anderson’s own ceremony had been pleasant, a bit like an initiation, like something out of Jules Verne, or one of Somerset Maugham’s spy stories. That was the way tech people felt about the things they did, sometimes. Griff hadn’t been there yet, which might have been part of it.
